No Dumping

Last November, the voters of Marlboro County, S.C. held a countywide referendum on whether they wanted to have a new mega-dump built in their back yard or not.

And duh … ninety-four percent of them said “No.”

Issue over, right?

Not hardly.

Backed by a friggin’ army of State House lobbyists (led by Richard Davis), the waste companies are pushing hard to get two new landfills approved – including the Marlboro site.

And they’ve got former Gov. Jim Hodges, former Lt. Gov. Bob Peeler and two huge law firms – Nexsen Pruet and McNair – doing their bidding.

Looking at the numbers, South Carolina has tripled the amount of trash we’ve taken in from other states in the last six years alone, but that’s apparently not good enough for these people.

They want to shove tons of additional refuse into a small corner of S.C. that has clearly said “hell no, take that sh*t someplace else!”

Even Marlboro’s most influential lawmaker, Rep. Doug Jennings, is under the dumpers’ thumb (gotta love that expression).

Now we’ve covered some shady special interests in the past, but these people are by far the shadiest we’ve ever dealt with.

They target poor, rural towns (which desperately need revenue) and then try to buy off the local and state officials until they get what they want – which is a cheap place to dump more trash than you can possibly fathom.

Nothing is beneath them … and they’re not above threatening and cajoling to get their way.

Fortunately, State Sen. Gerald Malloy has a bill that would impose a two year moratorium on granting permits for new landfills – which makes a lot of sense seeing as South Carolina is currently operating at less than half its capacity.

Malloy lives in one of the poor counties where the mega-dumpers are trying to perfect their scam, but he’s getting broad bipartisan support for his bill.

We’ll be watching this vote very, very closely, people, making sure to tell you which politicians took the dirty money and then turned around and voted to trash our state.

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